TRADITIONAL, NOT CONVENTIONAL.

One-Minute Exercise (July 1, 2014)

A couple of weeks ago, I talked about the general recommendation that adults ages 20-59 get 150 minutes of aerobic-type exercise plus two weight training sessions of some sort every week. (Sorry for how vague that last guideline is – but that’s the actual guideline!) 150 minutes is five bouts of 30 minutes, of course, but for the reasons that most people exercise (weight and disease avoidance purposes) three 10-minute sessions are fully equivalent to one 30-minute session. Furthermore, this exercise can be beneficial in amounts as short as five minutes at a time. Although a ten-minute session is marginally better than two five-minute bouts, they both get the job done and are equally acceptable toward the week’s total.

Exercise overwhelmingly reduces the risk of almost every chronic disease that we worry about, yet only about four percent of us actually manage to perform the recommended amounts of exercise. (I spelled out “four” so you wouldn’t think it was a typographical error.) So I thought it would be worth mentioning that another recent study found definite benefits in exercise sessions as short as ONE MINUTE at a time.

Normally I would think there is something enormously trying about 12 to 20 sessions of exercise a day, however short they might be. But I can think of one very practical way that this would make sense, and possibly it is what the authors of the study had in mind -- if anyone out there is watching television 2+ hours a day and not exercising, commercial breaks are plenty long enough to start fitting in a few of these sessions.

When you first start exercising (or quit junk food) there is a short period of sharp suffering before you start feeling the benefits. (That period actually seems to begin BEFORE you start, when you anticipate beginning, which is why many people never start in the first place.) But the great thing about exercise (and quitting junk food, too) is that once you start doing it and get past that initial Aaaack! period, you begin to feel like doing more of it. It isn’t long before you actually feel worse if you go back to your old habits.

The trick about the one-minute sessions is that the training has to be high intensity (like walking very fast, climbing stairs, jumping rope, or chasing the cat to get the bird out of her mouth while simultaneously screaming “Bad girl! No birds!”). So don’t do this if you have any heart issues or are really, really out of shape. But, if you aren’t exercising right now, please remember that you don’t have to do very much to obtain a lot of real benefit and do find some way to begin.